JPM have always been the real power - GS are nouveaux.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Were JPM to have to cover their short with physical silver, it would only cost them a couple of $billion at todays price. But should that need arise, the price would be likely to soar. Armand Hammer made a quite tidy sum for the Occidental Headquarters unit, (normally an expense item), by buying a bunch of out of the money puts on silver when the Hunts had tried to corner the market and drove the price to >$40/oz in the early eighties. I wonder if out of the money calls on silver would do the same today?
It is my understanding that a large short position on a market usually depresses the price of that item, until and unless short sellers are forced to unwind their position. And while most of the gold ever mined is still in someone's possession, that is not the case for silver, which has industrial uses that result in it being dispersed in economically unrecoverable amounts. Peak silver? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Also at risk are any of the institutions through which you invest or hold assets, especially such markets as ishares of gold or silver and other ETFs such as inverse Diamonds or Spiders. One could make a winning bet on the direction of the market via an inverse Diamond or ishare gold only to lose everything if the institution offering the product implodes. And such "bear market" bets are highly unlikely to get bailed out. After all, people who think the market is overpriced and not based on fundamentals are the ones always responsible for crashes, you know.
The safest recourse with precious metals is to own the physical metal and have it in your control, i.e. your safe deposit box. Try to do that today, say with 10% of your savings as a hedge against currency collapse, and you find that you must wait at leas two months for delivery, unless, perhaps, you want to buy premium collector coins. During that two months the seller has your money and you are exposed to institution risk. If the seller goes bankrupt before delivery, you get in line in bankruptcy court for dimes on dollars. So where lies safety and sanity? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Not in pieces of paper or shiny objects for damn sure.
How about a functioning social system that includes a concern for the Public Good? How about an economic system that doesn't steal everything from the 98% to give to the 2%?
And so on.
(But, then, you know this.)
